The Gold Mine in Ads That Aren’t on Google Health

The new Google Health service doesn’t (yet) have any advertising. Google still stands to make a lot of money from drug company ads on searches that the service will spawn.

Google no doubt would like to help you live a long and healthy life. But let's be clear: the company's new medical records system is largely about advertising, especially ads by drug companies. When announcing the long-delayed Google Health service at a convention of healthcare technologists in Orlando, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said that at first there would be no ads on the service. He compared it to Google News, a popular service that to date doesn't carry any advertising. (That isn't because Google doesn't want ads on its news site. But putting them there would be controversial, because the site links to articles on sites with which Google doesn't have any business relationship.) A Google spokesman said, however, that the company may well put ads on future versions of the service. But it doesn't even need to. Presumably parts of Google Health, like most everything Google does, will have a box that can be used to launch a Web search. The search results pages, of course, will have Google's standard ads. What won't be standard, most likely, is the revenue that comes from those ads. Health is among the most lucrative categories of advertising, in part because there is no better way for drug companies to reach prospects than when they are searching for or reading about certain conditions. After you go online to read the results of your blood glucose test, you may well be very much in the mood to do a search for, say, Type 2 diabetes. There are no small number of drug companies and insulin distributors that want to be part of those search results. One of the most interesting aspects of Google's business model is that the company can play this totally clean -- no ads on any Google health pages and no use of the medical data for any commercial purposes – and still make a mint from medical ads. That is, of course, if anyone actually uses Google Health, but that's another topic. (By the way, Google Health isn't available to the general public yet. It is being tested with patients at the Cleveland Clinic. Google's blog post discussing the service is here.)